Can a pocket watch outshine the Apple Watch?

Forget the Apple Watch
AAPL, +1.72%
. The hottest new thing in timepieces may turn out to be a concept as old as your grandfather’s pocket watch.

That’s because it is your grandfather’s pocket watch. Or a contemporary homage to it.

Yes, the pocket watch — the pre-wristwatch timepiece that has a history going back at least four centuries — is making a major comeback, according to trend spotters and jewelry industry analysts. Retailers and brands, from Walmart to Cartier, are touting pocket watches in a wide range of styles (in 2012, Cartier unveiled a white-gold one that ran more than $650,000). Celebrities and fashion icons — Johnny Depp and Justin Timberlake included — are sporting pocket watches, new or old (hey, there’s nothing that says you can’t wear your grandfather’s watch). And on a related note, a pocket watch owned by James Dean sold for $42,000 at an auction not long ago.

There’s even an effort to give the pocket watch a smartwatch-style relevance: Witness the $169 Kisai Rogue Touch Pocket Watch — true to its name, it’s a pocket watch with touch features and a liquid-crystal display.

But whatever the look or style, the pocket watch “is a natural for the marketplace,” says Liz Chatelain of MVI Marketing, a company in San Luis Obispo, Calif., that tracks the jewelry industry.

Part of what’s likely driving the trend is the resurgence in watches in general. For a while, it appeared the watch category was dying a slow death, as consumers turned to cellphones, cable boxes and computer screens instead of watches for the time. But with luxury names successfully marketing watches as design showpieces and with other brands promoting watches that can cross the day (work) and night (play) divide, sales have started to climb — up 42% since 2009 to $8.3 billion, according to market researcher Euromonitor International. (Euromonitor doesn’t break out sales for pocket watches, but most researchers who track the watch industry say the pocket watch sub-category has grown from a point of near-extinction to something small but healthy in recent years.)

Another key factor to the pocket watch mini boom? Call it retro chic — or more to the point, hipster chic. It’s the hipster crowd’s embrace of all things vintage that has allowed manual typewriters and record players to surface again. Pocket watches are a natural extension of that trend. Plus, pocket watches play into the steampunk movement, a Victorian-minded retro sensibility that’s also gaining ground.

Either way, what’s old is new again, says Allen Salkin, a cultural critic who wrote recently about the return of the monocle , another relic poised for a comeback. And as Salkin notes, pocket watches have a certain appeal because they’re not only “a beautiful little piece of technology,” but they’re also one that can be easily grasped by the layperson. “You pop open the back of your iPhone and you won’t see cool little gears working,” he adds.

The irony is that today’s owners of pocket watches may be fascinated with all those gears, but they’re not always worried about the watch’s essential function, says Douglas Stuart, owner of PocketWatchRepair.com, a Seattle-based company that specializes in restoring vintage timepieces. Sure, they want to make certain the watch is in good working order, says Stuart, but they really see its value more as a fashion statement than anything else.

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